Parents can set a better example to help inculcate better driving practices in their teenage children. Unfortunately, far too many parents actually ignore advice by their teenage children about driving safely.
According to the results of a new study that was released by Liberty Mutual, many parents continue to ignore warnings about distracted driving and other dangerous driving practices by their teenage children. About 42% of teenage passengers in the study admitted that they have asked their parents to stop text messaging while driving. About 32 percent said that they had tried to get their parents to stop driving while under the influence of marijuana. Among the children who advised parents to stop such dangerous driving behavior, 40% said that their parents either ignored them, or made excuses for their bad driving behavior. The results indicate that the parents must also be included in safe driving awareness campaigns and other initiatives.
Los Angeles car accident lawyers believe that the worst kind of driving behavior exhibited by parents is distracted driving. Your teenage child is not likely to take your warnings about cell phone use while driving seriously, if you don’t bother to switch off your cell phone while driving. If your child sees you frequently checking your text messages or texting back or answering a cell phone call while you are driving, he very likely to believe that such practices are not really that dangerous.
Additionally, parents who ignore warnings by their teenage children against driving under the influence of marijuana, drunk driving or distracted driving, only grant legitimacy to such types of risky behavior. This only increases the risk that the teenager will begin to consider such behaviors as acceptable, or at least not as dangerous as the media makes them out to be.
There’s very little that can be done to help reduce the risk of teenage accidents, if parents do not educate their children about safe driving. Parents need to set a better example for their children, and must take proactive steps to display safe driving in front of their children. You must drive attentively at all times, but it is even more important that you do so when you have teenage children in the car.
